How we score gifts
Every score on review.gift is worked out from public reviews, and every number links back to where it came from. We don't test products or accept samples.
Last updated
We don’t test gifts. We haven’t held the products on this site. We read what other people wrote about them and turn that into a score, with the working shown.
Why not just look at the star rating?
Because a star rating tells you whether people liked the product, not whether it made a good present. And one shop’s rating can be skewed by free-product reviews or a run of early enthusiasm.
So each gift page does three things a product listing doesn’t:
- It combines ratings from more than one source, so one shop’s average doesn’t stand alone.
- It lists the complaints that keep coming up, near the top. With a gift, the thing that annoys people usually matters more than the thing they like.
- It says who the gift is wrong for.
Where we can find enough reviews from people who bought the thing as a present, we also summarise what they said and who they bought it for.
How the score works
The score is an average of every rated source we cite, weighted by how many reviews each one has. 12,000 reviews on Amazon count for more than 40 on a brand’s website.
Nobody types the score in. It’s calculated from the sources on the page, and each source shows its rating, how many reviews it’s based on, and the date we checked it, with a link. You can check any figure yourself.
| Score | What it means |
|---|---|
| 4.4 and above | Hit. The sources agree it’s good. |
| 4.0 to 4.3 | Mixed. Well reviewed, but the same complaints keep coming up. |
| Below 4.0 | Miss. For combined shop ratings, that’s poor. |
Those cut-offs are high on purpose. Most shop ratings land between 4.0 and 4.8, so a 4.0 is below average, not good.
How much to trust a score
Each page also shows how much evidence is behind its score, because an average of 80 reviews and an average of 40,000 aren’t the same thing:
- Strong: more than 1,000 reviews from two or more separate sources.
- Fair: more than 150 reviews.
- Thin: fewer than 150. Treat the score as a rough guide.
Some sources are a brand’s own website. Brands can choose which reviews to show, so when that’s the only rated source we have, the page says so.
What goes on a page
Praised and criticised are the points that come up again and again, in our own words. The site won’t publish a gift page with nothing in the criticised list.
Quotes are short extracts from public reviews, copied exactly, with the source named and linked. We don’t tidy them up and we don’t make them up.
What we won’t do
- Claim to have tested, held, given or received anything.
- Make up quotes, reactions or who someone bought a gift for.
- Publish a score without its sources.
- Take a page down because the gift scored badly.
- Take money for a score, a placement or a ranking, or show a brand a page before it goes up.
What this can’t tell you
Online reviews lean positive. Early reviews lean more positive than later ones. Some listings have fake or paid-for reviews that we can’t always spot. Using several sources helps with all three, but it doesn’t fix them. When two sources disagree a lot, we say so on the page.
Reviews also can’t tell you whether one particular person will like one particular present. They tell you how it went for everyone else.
Keeping it up to date
Prices and ratings change, so every figure has the date we checked it. When we update a page, the date on it changes too.
If a number looks wrong, tell us. That’s why the sources are linked.